Research

Thermoelectric power generation technology: from materials to devices

Time of publication:2021-03-24   Number of views:52

Speaker:Ruiheng Liu

Time:2020/11/5  10:00-11:00 A.M

Location:Room 1206, Zhiyuan Building

 

Abstract:

Because of its important application in waste heat recovery, thermoelectric(TE) technology has attracted more and more attention from both academia and industry. Since the 21st century, with the rapid development of new thermoelectric transport theory and new compounds, the performance of thermoelectric materials has been greatly improved, and ZT value has achieved above 2.0 in laboratory. However, the conversion efficiency of thermoelectric devices and generator systems lag behind the materials development. To bridge the technical gap between material properties in the laboratory and the final power generation system for industry, our recent work focus on the exploration of novel materials for medium temperature, the scaling-up fabrication of TE materials, the high-throughput screening of diffusion barriers for TE devices, and optimal design of TE module and generator system. Based on the properties of the mass production materials, we realized optimal structure design of single-stage and segmented thermoelectric modules by using finite element simulation method, and achieve high conversion efficiency of 10.4% for SKD and HH single stage module, and 12.4% for Bi2Te3/HH segmented module. We also proposed a “Device- materials” strategy to realize “double high” TE module, i.e. high efficiency and high power density, which is highly expected for industrial application.